


Suspended Paralysis

by MourningPluto



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Humanstuck, M/M, Sexual Content, Suicide Attempt, self harm mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 06:33:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MourningPluto/pseuds/MourningPluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"My decision to move on - beyond the death of Sollux Captor and, with it, everything else - was no more of a decision than the one made by an unconscious man to be transferred to an intensive care unit, or by a baby to be born, or by rain to fall in a city that’s already flooding. In a way, it was not a decision at all. It was paralysis."</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>This is the first paragraph of your novel. You still think it’s awful. When you hear people quoting it, you cringe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Suspended Paralysis

You are walking down Nightshade Alley, which is the most improperly named out of all the streets in Washington, to your estimation. 

_Atropa belladonna._ That’s what it’s called. It grows in Europe and Africa and Asia; not here. Deadly nightshade, they call it. Women used to put the shit in their eyes to make them wide and ladylike. Bella donna. Beautiful woman. 

It’s a poison.

Nightshade Alley sounds like it ought to be scary, and perhaps it is but not for any of the reasons that might make it interesting. If it were anything like its name it might be dark and desolate. Crack heads and crack whores might lurk from behind buildings, laughter like barking in the empty night sky. In daylight it would be barren; only the moon would cause it to bear fruit of any kind. And then in that moonlight, terrible, frightening people would emerge from the shadows to dance with monsters like madmen. 

This is the kind of fear you can work with.

Nightshade Alley is bright and sunny. It is the opposite of your apartment, which is silent, still, and very cold. You’ve gone for several months without hearing anything other than the muted, dulcet tones of whatever shit’s playing on TV. You don’t pay attention anymore. In fact, truth be told you could really live without leaving your apartment at all. You ordered your groceries online for a brief stint until they made a declaration to stop selling your brand of coffee. That’s pretty typical. And Feferi flat-out refuses to do your shopping for you. Stopped after the first month. Karkat doesn’t answer your calls and you don’t answer his. Kanaya, you suspect, moved back to California. 

So you find yourself walking down Pansy Street, which is the main street that runs down the area known as Nightshade Alley. The sun is high in the sky and you squint your eyes even though it’s been at least fifteen minutes now that you’ve been outside. Fifteen minutes, yes, for the first time in...

Yes, it has been that long. It has been a month and twelve days exactly that you’ve stayed locked away in your apartment.

Pansy Street is more aptly named because it is bright and colorful. Less so because the streets strike you as amphetamine more than opiate. The zeal of the people who traverse the busy sidewalks and pour out of stores like locusts is terrifying in a way that you find absolutely abhorrent. It leaves you with a fear that, like every other feeling you stumble upon, tastes dull and vaguely like a work of fiction. Since that March - not even this one - every feeling you’ve ever had is like Splenda, no real substitute at all. 

You wish you weren’t so moody. You are a cliche. 

Perhaps if you were some random nobody, you would not stand out on Pansy Street, squinting in the horizon like somebody blind to it. Though your dark clothes cause you to swelter under the heat of the sun (which is really rather rare for Washington, anyway), you don’t bother shedding your jacket or sweater because that would be paramount to shedding your skin like a snake.

“Hey, it’s _him_ ,” someone says, and you freeze.

You are not some random nobody.

You detect the source of the noise; some woman, in her thirties, probably. A woman next to her squints, too, and it is perhaps out of vanity that you find yourself wondering if she’s mocking you. “Bullshit,” you hear her, “the author guy?” 

You, as the author guy, make a speedy getaway into a nearby coffee shop.

You used to come here all the time and the barista is not the one you remember. She quirks a brow at you, perhaps not remembering quite where she’s seen you. That’s good. You could use that. You breathe a soft sigh of relief and collapse onto one of the wirey iron-clad chairs. 

You see yourself on a magazine cover and balk. 

“Is this-” you gasp shortly, and you walk over to the magazine rack and snatch it. It’s from that fucking interview, which was ages ago--and also before Suspending Paralysis was being made into a piece of cinematic fucking trash. On the picture you look gaunt and alabaster. Nearly translucent. 

It is, you realize with mild horror, from April of last year. 

The title on the cover takes you a minute to process in the sense that sometimes when you go to a website and they make you type something to prove you’re human you have to take a moment to decipher what the hell’s going on, if the characters are Russian or Korean or alien, whether you’re human or not. It’s just as nonsensical - “Stockholm Made Sexy”. What the fuck is that even supposed to mean?

The cover entreats you to flip to page forty-two (the meaning of life--oh, shit, you hadn’t meant to hear it in his voice like that) and so you do. There’s a picture of you, more recent based off the look in your eyes. Not so much mourning as dead. 

Next to your portrait is something that you, apparently, said. At least the magazine is attributing it to you. 

“I’m something of an emotional masochist.” 

You throw the magazine on the ground like it’s trash. 

+++

For all of March everyone basically let you be dead, too. 

You slept a lot. Everyone was real understanding. You were there at the funeral but only barely and you had some schmaltzy pre-written speech (you’ve always been fucking nifty with a turn of phrase) but when you tried to say the first sentence you had a panic attack and Feferi had to escort you out of the church, slipping you some of your Klonopin and rubbing your throat so you’d swallow, the way Sollux used to when you had panic attacks in public, which to be fair was only once or twice at the very most.

You slept a lot.

 _Shh, he’s sleeping._ You slept and slept and slept and slept and slept and sometimes you’d wake up, and you’d remember all over again. You did a lot of crying but that didn’t last very long. In fact, you have not shed a single tear since at least mid-April. For all of March you were little more than a corpse with the ability to blink and stare owlishly, real confused and dreary and only responding to the sound of your name, if that. 

Feferi put up with your shit until around May and that’s when she got pissy. After all, she had to move on with her life. And wasn’t that right? The world of marine biology wasn’t going to wait for her to get over her dead ex-lover. (They weren’t lovers. They slept together one time. One time. You know. She told you. She said that once they did something else, some kind of touching, some kind of frottage, but that doesn’t count. They slept together once. They fucked once. You never thought to be jealous until long after the fact, when you recalled it with a blind seething anger that made you want to take those one-and-a-half-times from her.) And Karkat had to go back to work at the call center, and although you’d long ago quit working at the seafood joint, the world apparently expected you to move on, too.

Well, you couldn’t, of course. What you could do was sleep, even though your dreams were and still are awful. You had and still have all kinds of awful dreams.

The worst ones are the sex ones because you’re always fucking a corpse.

+++

Feferi sounds shocked to hear your voice, and even more shocked to hear that you’re pissed.

“Saw that tabloid trash today.” You’re storming down Nightshade and you can hear people looking at you. Can feel it on your skin. 

“Which tabloid trash?” She sounds nonchalant and that just pisses you off more. “There’s been lots of tabloids, Eridan. There’s a movie, don’t’cha know. You’ll never believe who’s playing you-”

“I don’t care,” you tell her. “They called it Stockholm. Stockholm syndrome, y’know, like the fucking criminals?” 

She says that yes she knows about the fucking criminals.

You’re back in the apartment and you turn on your nearly-broken MacBook for the first time in a long fucking time. It boots up. You guess you’re glad.

You type in “suspended paralysis” and so much shit comes up that you think you might vomit. 

Your favorite is the Tumblr posts. Teenage girls taking bits and pieces of your novel, your autobiography, your accounts and crossing them out with Sharpie. (Yeah, dipshits, that’s completely what you had in mind. You wrote that entire paragraph about the love of your shitty fuckin’ life so that it could be reduced to “psycho love hurts”, or whatever banal bullshit it ends up reduced to in the end. You never had a problem with it before but when it’s your words and when it’s Sollux, it makes you see red.) Also found on Tumblr: posts about how you and your dead boyfriend are hot, because that’s totally not fucking offensive.

Oh, but your REAL favorite isn’t even the stuff by dumb kids. It’s the adults.

They call you a masochist; they call you abused. Like, okay, you wrote one passage about your foray into S&M, so that makes you some kind of desperate sub? As if every other couple in America hasn’t pulled out the shitty Spencer’s handcuffs and gotten freaky in bed. As if that makes you special.

Abused.

They think Sollux abused you.

You open up your webcam and the sight of yourself, still eerily pale and set against the squalid, slovenly backdrop of your apartment, sobers you in a way that lets you know you had needed sobering in the first place.

+++

_"My decision to move on - beyond the death of Sollux Captor and, with it, everything else - was no more of a decision than the one made by an unconscious man to be transferred to an intensive care unit, or by a baby to be born, or by rain to fall in a city that’s already flooding. In a way, it was not a decision at all. It was paralysis."_

This is the first paragraph of your novel. You still think it’s awful. When you hear people quoting it, you cringe. 

+++

You speak into the microphone of your laptop and you realize that, save for your conversation with Feferi, you have not spoken at all in quite some time.

“I’m gonna talk about Suspended Paralysis, because if I don’t, you fuckers are gonna keep havin’ the wrong idea about that terrible waste of words that you all insist on callin’ a novel.”

You sigh and rub your temples and you stop when you remember that you stole the habit from Sollux. He rubbed his temples when you fought and you started doing it too. 

You stop.

“Sollux-”

You hadn’t expected it to hurt so badly, but saying it out loud sort of feels like hearing the news all over again.

“Sollux didn’t abuse me, alright. He was the light of my shitty fuckin’ life, and now he’s dead.” 

It’s like you have to remind yourself at all times. Like you could fucking forget.

“Yeah, like that really pisses me off, okay. I see all you assholes sayin’ he was crazy--and maybe he was. Hell,” you laugh to the camera, even though it sounds ugly, “I guess we both were. Dating each other was the stupidest thing either of us could have done. Ask anyone who knew us, no I’m not kiddin’, this is actually true.” 

Your smile looks bizarre and empty.

“But he wasn’t that kinda crazy. Not crazy enough to hit me or beat me or whatever, like, where the fuck do you get off? Where in my novel does it say I was a victim of domestic abuse? Point that out to me, because I don’t remember it -- oh, but what do I know? I’m only the goddamn author.” 

You can see your face redden and your nostrils are flaring. (Sollux made fun of you for that ceaselessly. He was the kind of person who could be stoically angry or pissed enough to scream. You were capable of getting him to fluctuate between the two on a whim.)

“You’re all wrong. All of you. Like, I don’t want to see anymore shit where you talk about what a tortured soul I am, or how my heart bleeds, or what hidden bruises I must have. You draw these pictures where I cut? Yeah, _fuck you,_ ” you hiss. “Take it from someone who used to date a -- oh, watch out guys, a _cutter._ That shit isn’t something you glamorize. Yeah, talk about it if you need to, but don’t fucking call it sexy because if you do you deserve to be shot.” 

You are, as Sollux used to say in one of the myriad ways he would mock you, “proper pissed” now.

“So why don’t you all hop off my dead boyfriend’s dick, would you?” 

You turn off your screen. Good.

Good.

You delete the video like every other time and you go to your room because quite frankly you’re not sure you could keep your eyes open to the other shit on TV, and God fucking forbid you see yourself on screen.

+++

You don’t, and never will, know his last words.

His last words to you, however, were, “Fine, asshole, I’ll go get your fucking mineral water.” Which was when you said, "Good, you'd better," and he winked at you sitcom-cheesy and slammed the door behind him. And you like to think if the circumstances had been different you might have worried, or done something different. If you were smarter or better or hell, if it had even been obvious. For one thing you sure wouldn’t have let him leave at three in the morning, or drunk, or high, but the fact of the matter is that sometimes accidents happen, and accidents happened on March 21st of last year.

He was run over; that’s what they told you. The first thing you thought was _no_ but the first thing you said, to a nurse calling you because apparently Sol put you down as his emergency contact, was, “What kind of fuckface is drunk at three in the afternoon?” 

You wouldn’t find out the other sordid details until much later. That the guy was not only drunk but a taxi driver, and that the taxi in question had contained a fifteen-year old honors student by the name of Micheala Fitzpatrick. That she would get news coverage and pictures of her crying parents on the news. Of course, at that point in time, Sollux had been sleeping. Not dead. Sleeping. He still took breaths and even though they were through tubes in his nose the point of the matter is that they were still breaths.

So you weren’t jealous. You just felt bad for her, really. Freckle-faced little girl with grey eyes. And doesn’t it have to be terrible to die at fifteen?

When Sollux really kicked it you didn’t believe it for a solid three days. You visited the hospital every day and got turned down, every day. Feferi had to tell you he was dead three times, bless her giant heart. She was always so patient with you, really. And every single time you lashed out at her, screaming and calling her names, and she’d scream back. You’d say, _don’t keep screaming, if Sol wakes up he’ll think you’re crazy,_ and then of course she would tell you that he is not waking up. 

He had an aneurysm. You kissed his forehead at 8:00 am and came back with coffee and the body was only sort of cold.

You picked coffee over your boyfriend, in the end. Although there’s no way you could have known.

Of course not.

They wanted his ashes - he was cremated, because you distinctly remember fighting with him about which was better, a coffin or an urn - spread in the park. And you were too listless to complain, too lifeless to argue, until Karkat opened the lid and you started screaming at everybody because Sollux hated the park, he hated it and why couldn’t you spread his ashes at an arcade or that one computer shop or anywhere but the fucking park, with its sun and trees and animals? 

He was a recluse - your recluse - and when you held him in your arms, smelling his hair half-awake and clinging to him like you were lost at sea, he never smelled like sunshine. He was moonlight and dryer sheets and canned air and cinnamon. 

He was not _sunlight._

You ended up getting your way and Sollux’s ashes were spread at the pier, where you had your first date. Karkat was clearly annoyed but couldn’t say anything because even before you moved here he was always down by the docks. In essence, it was his long before it was yours. 

And then you slept, ceaselessly.

+++

You have a gun that you don’t tell anyone about.

Feferi confiscated one of your guns; her fault for thinking you don’t have a spare. She took your Tommy, your pride and joy, and she took your rifle, which was your dad’s. You let her because she basically stormed in and took them, and she was letting the light in so you said you’d let her take them as long as she promised to shut the goddamn door. And to her credit, she did.

You have a pistol that she, by some divine providence, did not find.

You pull it out of the drawer with trembling hands; they always shake ferociously, probably some kind of arthritis even though you’re barely thirty-one. Early onset. Probably that. You make your way into the bathroom, which is connected to your bedroom that you never sleep in. You haven’t slept in your bed since he died even though it was yours, a real family heirloom.

It feels sick, so you sleep on the couch and let your back ache. 

Because you are courteous enough not to want a mess, you lie down in the bathtub. As per usual, the apartment is quiet. Maybe there really is noise and you just don’t hear it. You think when Sollux was around you’d hear him bitch about the couple upstairs fucking or the squealing brood belonging to that boorish woman in 2A running about in the halls. But you don’t hear them anymore. Haven’t for some time.

You’re used to sticking the barrel in your mouth because you’ve tried before; tried and never succeeded with the act of killing yourself. Will today be the day that you go through with it? End this useless, silently screaming existence? Will this moment be the moment that you allow your oxygen to be used by someone else? Perhaps another Micheala will find use for the breaths that would have been yours.

You pull the trigger. Nothing happens.

You pull harder.

It’s still not quite hard enough and it might even be funny, the way you get out so emotionlessly. Another day, another failure. Not like you’d really do it. Not as if you’d really go through with it.

Throughout everything, you still love yourself too much.

A part of you is glad that he died. You’re famous, after all.

You don’t think about that, though, as you place your pistol back in its hidey-hole and sit down on the bed you refuse to sleep in. You pick up the pillow (his pillow) and you press it to your face. Breathe it in as closely and deeply as you possibly can. 

It smells like your apartment, and like linens, and like dust.

For the first time in over a year, you weep.

**Author's Note:**

> YEAH SO this was an anon request and I had a lot of fun writing this. >u> Kinda got it done in an hour, just really wanted to crank out a oneshot tonight, so that's basically that. 
> 
> Also I'm all for writing in books don't kill me.


End file.
